Nagoya City University, Graduate School of Nursing

The new school term started in a situation different from previous years in Fiscal 2020 due to the spread of COVID-19 infection. The world has been suffering this unprecedented event over months, and universities have been forced to deal with difficult challenges of the prevention of COVID-19 infection and the guarantee to provide education.

Our university provide our senior undergraduates with practical training to take care patients in serious condition in ICU to alleviate their pain and the “awareness training” at the emergency room to enhance the understanding on the mental process of nurses based on the Tanner’s Clinical Judgment Model. In the awareness training, students see how nurses treat emergency patients and discuss the mental process with nurses to deepen the understanding on clinical judgment.

As being unable to offer the practical training in hospital due to the spread of COVID-19 this year, we decided to provide the “awareness training” using a virtual simulation system called Body InteractTM, with which multi-threaded scenarios specific to each emergency patient’s condition are played on the Internet. If the player made appropriate action the patient’s condition improves, if not it deteriorates. Our students seemed to feel the ambience in the actual emergency room. Debriefing of their action and the grounds for judgment was held using Zoom and their degree of learning was confirmed by the report concerning the clinical judgment process. It is important to check if such new efforts can provide students with the same learning outcome as the usual approach. All the lectures and practical training offered this year must be thoroughly evaluated from now on.

Social conditions and the way of education may become different from those before the outbreak of COVID-19 in the post COVID-19 era but nursing that we want to teach to our students will not change. While hoping that the crisis will end at the earliest timing, we would like to review our experiences of and learning from the COVID-19 crisis to explore the ideal education in future.